A sanitation solution: Stanford students introduce dry toilets in Haiti

(Scopeblog) - By Becky Bach on March 26th, 2015 1 Comment

In the United States, we often take for granted the relationship between health and sanitation. Not so in Haiti, where some people dispose of their feces in plastic bags they throw into waterways. As a result, waterborne diseases like cholera are common.
But what’s to be done? Flush toilets guzzle gallons of water and depend on an entire sewage system — an unfeasible option in many developing nations. To fill the gap, a pair of Stanford civil and environmental engineering graduate students have developed a program called re.source, which provides dry household toilets, and empties them for about $5 a month.
From a recent Stanford News story:

Unlike most sanitation solutions that only address one part of a dysfunctional supply chain, container-based sanitation models, such as the re.source service, tackle the whole sanitation chain. The re.source toilets separate solid and liquid waste into sealable containers, and dispense a cover material made of crushed peanut shells and sugarcane fibers that eliminates odors and insect infestations. The solid waste is regularly removed by a service, which takes it to a disposal or processing site to be converted to compost and sold to agricultural businesses.

The re.source students — Kory Russel and Sebastien Tilmans — work under the guidance of Jenna Davis, PhD, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. They started small, with a free pilot phase in 130 households in a Haitian slum, but the service has expanded to include 300 additional households with plans to introduce a service in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The project is part of a larger Stanford focus on water issues ranging from safe drinking water to environmental concerns.